Social Networking Wars

The social networking wars are certainly hotting up.

To my mind Facebook is the clear leader at the moment whereaqs MySpace is really begining to show its age. Why?

MySpace is an open architecture whereas Facebook to some extent is closed off. This initially helped mySpace as it gave users a huge amount of personalisation but I think this is now becoming the rope by which it will be hung. Too much spam, huge amounts of bloated unusable pages and flash aps embedded everywhere result is one of the worst user experiences for such a commercial site in many years.

Facebook on the other hand has kept itself clean. The IA and UE are class leading 95% of the time. It's build in a huge number of features that are making it one of the stickiest sites around and the features keep coming. Opening the API up to developers is a genious move. And then there's the user base. MySpace built it's user base around music initially to gain a huge leap in subscribers and it's more tailored to a younger audience, whereas Facebook is more focused on education in terms of it's initial user lead. School turns to work and academia and the users grow. The thing that's catching media attention in the UK is that Facebook is MySpace for grown ups. To some extent this will be the secret to it's success. MySpace broke early adopters into social networking, but Facebook will take the momentum and capirtalise on it taking social networking mass market.

So where next? How will MySpace respond? Will it respond?